Friday, August 07, 2015

The ever resourceful, ever peculiar Arthur Koestler devoted
two books to a minor figure in the history of science: Paul Kammerer. One book,
The case of the Midwife Toad, detailed Kammerer’s search for proof that
Lamarkian evolution – the inheritance of acquired traits – actually exists. The
other book, The Roots of Coincidence, explored Kammerer’s fascination with what
he called seriality, which found its way into Kammerer’s 1919, Das Gesetz der
Serie. As I pointed out, if we take Cournot’s reasoning to be correct, there
shouldn’t be a “law” of coincidence, since coincidence is, by definition, a
byproduct of the fact that the laws of physics are both plural and independent
one from the other. Thus, a law of coincidence would simply create another kind
of coincidence that it couldn’t encompass, and thus would not be a law of all
coincidences at all – eliminating it from consideration as a law of physics.

Nevertheless, while 20th century physicists did
follow, reluctantly, the probabilistic path scouted out by Cournot, there were
intellectuals – sometimes including physicists of note, such as Wolfgang Pauli –
who couldn’t resist the impulse of trying to discover some law to explain the
interstices of chance.

Mostly, these intellectuals were not physicists, however.
Rather, they were, many of them, concerned that the geometric spirit was
strangling the poetry of the world, and sought places at the spiritual front
where they could fight back. Often, however, they ended up fighting back using
the methods of their opponents – that is, instead of claiming poetry as a power
in its own right, they claimed that they were making scientific discoveries.

Kammerer, according to Koestler, made notebooks in which he
recorded coincidences. He was on the lookout for them. A coincidence notebook
is something to dream about – what a wonderful form for a novel! Here’s what it looks like, in an extract from
Koestler:

Kammerer's book contains a hundred samples of

coincidences. For instance:

(7) On September 18, 1916, my wife, while waiting for her turn in the
consulting rooms of Prof. Dr.j.

v. H., reads the magazine Die Kunst; she is impressed by some
reproductions of pictures by a painter named Schwalbach, and makes a mental
note to remember his name because she would like to see the originals. At that
moment the door opens and the receptionist calls out to the patients: "Is Frau Schwalbach here? She is
wanted on the telephone."

(22) On July 28, 1915, I experienced the following progressive
series: (a) my wife was reading about

"Mrs. Rohan", a character in the novel Michael by Hermann Bang; in the tramway
she saw a man who

looked like her friend, PrinceRohan;
in the evening Prince Rohan dropped in onus.
(b) In the

tram she overheard somebody askirig the pseudo-Rohan
whether he knew the village of Weissenbach

on Lake Attersee, and whether it would be a pleasant
place for a holiday. When she got out of the tram,

she went to a delicatessen shop on the Naschmarkt, where
the attendant asked her whether she happened

to know Weissenbach on Lake Attersee-he had to make
a delivery by mail and did not know the correct

postal
address.”

Those who have the ear for these things will be impressed by the
similarity (the coincidence?) of this kind of prose with Freud’s cases from
ordinary life in the Psychopathology, which contains the famous (and much
disputed) analysis of a “Freudian slip”. The coincidence, in fact, seems to be
a sort of slip by fate itself – as though some secret law governing human events
slips quickly into and out of view. Kammerer, like Freud, was concerned with
repetition. He defined the series as "a
lawful recurrence of the same or similar things and events -a recurrence, or
clustering, in time or space whereby the individual members in the sequence-as
far as can be ascertained by careful analysis-are not connected by the same
active cause".

What they are connected by is the same person,
depending on the case.

Six years before Kammerer’s book, Freud had
published one of his more adventurous works: Totem and Taboo. In this book, he
develops the idea of projection as a process by which the ambiguity of feelings
one has about a person are relieved – in the case of “primitives”, by imputing
hostility to the spirits of the dead, a hostility that has its real origin in
the hostility one felt about them living. This idea has had a long career, and
merged into the ordinary way of thinking about how we negotiate feeling and
interactions with others so that it no longer seems or is even recognized, much
of the time, as Freudian. Of course, it is a word that coincided with a
technology – the projection of images on a screen – that also characterized one
of the long events in the cultural life of the twentieth century. Freud sees,
in a sense, the false divide that separates the “primitive” from the modern,
even if the only moderns that he compares to primitives are neurotics. As to
neurotics – in essence, you have successful ones, who sublimate their neuroses,
and unsuccessful ones, who exibit it, and that is the psychopathology of
everyday life. Mental illness is a
matter of degree, not a difference in kind.

Which is why projection is fundamentally based,
according to Freud, on the human setup:

“But projection exists not only as a defense mechanism, but
it also arises where there are no conflicts. The projection of inner
perceptions to the outside is a primitive mechanism which underlies, for
instance, our sense perceptions, which thus have the greatest share in shaping
our outer world. Under not sufficiently fixed conditions, our inner perceptions
will also project outward our feeling and thought processes as well as our
sense perceptions, applying them to the forming of the outer world while they
should remain bound to the inner world. This is connected genetically, perhaps,
to the fact that the function of attention is not originally directed to the
inner world, but instead to stimuli streaming in from the outer world,
receiving from the endopsychic processes only reports of the development of pleasure
or pain. Only with the construction of an abstract thought language, through
the conjunction of sense-related remnants of verbal representations with inner
processes, does this become gradually perceptible. Up to this point the
primitive person through projection of inner perceptions on the outside
develops a picture of the outer world that we only now, with a heightened sense
of consciousness in psychology, are forced to retranslate.”

Projection and coincidence seem, intuitively, to
have something to do with each other in the Freudian schema.

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

In Mill’s Logic, that grand old lumber room, in Chapter 18
of Book three, a principle is spelled
out that, in our day, has been shorthanded into the sometimes tendentious
phrase, correlation does not prove
causation:

“Although two or more cases in which the phenomenon a has been met with may have no common antecedent
except A, this does not prove that there is any connection between a and A, since a may have
many causes, and may have been produced, in these different instances, not by
any thing which the instances had in common, but by some of those elements in
them which were different.”

Mill, in keeping with his practical bent, distills from this
a question: “After how many and what sort of instances may it be concluded that
an observed coincidence between two phenomena is not the effect of chance?”

Another way of putting this question is: when is a
coincidence really a coincidence?

As Francois Mentre has pointed out, the French mathematician
and scientist, Cournot, was also intested in this question, or at least in one
of its guises: the reality of probability. Cournot worked in the shadow of
Laplace; but where Laplace, finally, came down on the side of a universal
determinism, Cournot was sure that this move was not justified by Laplace’s
mathematics. “He could not admit that
chance was nothing but a “vain sound,
flatus vocis, which we use, as Laplace said, to disguise our ignorance of true
causes.” For him [Cournot], chance had an objective reality independent of our
knowledge.” (144) Cournot spelled out his ontological conviction by way of a
critique of Laplace. Laplace wrote that Nature obeys “a small number of
immutable laws.” Cournot’s disprove of Laplace’s determinism moves from this
idea: “it suffices, said Cournot, that there be only two, perfectly independent
one from the other, in order that we must make a place for the fortuitous in
the government of the world. Whether or not we do or do not know the literal law for each
of the independent two series, as soon as they intersect, there is chance.
Chance thus does not derive from our ignorance of the laws of the universe, no
more than it diminishes as the measure of our knowledge extends. It subsists in
the eyes of the expert as well as those of the ignoramus. It is necessary to
accept it as an irreducible, sui generis fact that has a notable part in the
government of the world.” (209)

This, though, is hard to accept, either for the expert or
the ignoramus or that hybrid of the two, the modern mystic..

One can see that Cournot’s observation blocks two popular
explanations of coincidence (or chance – in fact, I am using coincidence here
as a proxy for a semantic family that includes the French hasard and the German
Zufall). True coincidence can neither be purely the effect of human ignorance
of the causes in place, nor can itself be characteristic of some autonomous law
– a law of synchronicity or seriality. The same reasoning Cournot applies to
other laws would apply in this case, so that any law of synchronicity would
inevitably generate coincidences that would fall outside its domain as it
intersected with other universal laws, creating, if you will,
hypercoincidences.

One way of looking at physics in the 20th century
is that the physicists were both moved by the fact that the world given by a
structure that was governed by two or more irreducible laws would have to accord
a large place to chance – such that probability was no longer a way of
mathematically stylizing elements that were, to an all powerful intelligence,
always certain – and a movement to unify the laws of physics, to reduce them to
some grand single principle, which would drive out coincidence.

However, there was also a tradition, a fringe tradition,
that rejected the whole idea that coincidence wasn’t subject to its own proper
law. Instead, it sought that law. This was an especially popular theme in Germany
in the 20s, coexisting with a faddish interest in psychoanalysis,
physiognomics, graphology, paranormal psychology, etc. Psychoanalysis had a
tentative relationship with these things, which fascinated Freud, but which,
finally, he diagnosed as cultural symptoms of a mass psychopathology.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.